Uighur Specialties, With Lamb Front and Center, at Kebab Empire

Slide Show | Uighur Food, Showcased in Manhattan Meat, above all lamb, is the focus at this restaurant, whose owner, Kudret Yakup, grew up in the desert town of Kashgar in the far western borderlands of China.

An Rong Xu for The New York Times

February 8, 2018

Hungry City

By LIGAYA MISHAN

It is nearly 6,600 miles from the desert town of Kashgar, on the old Silk Road in the far western borderlands of China, to this strip of Hell’s Kitchen in Midtown Manhattan anchored by a McDonald’s and a Wendy’s. Kudret Yakup, who grew up in Kashgar, opened Kebab Empire here in December, as what may be the first American franchise-in-the-making to showcase the food of the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking and mostly Muslim minority in China and Central Asia.

The menu is to the point: meat, and above all lamb. (In Kashgar, restaurants often hang whole sheep carcasses by the entrance.) Lamb chops, the juices shining, are thrust on blades a foot long, crossed like swords; leg of lamb is hewn in hunks, pressed with crushed cumin seeds, black pepper and salt, then skewered. Both pick up a good marbling of char from the grill — gas, not charcoal, but still the smoke goes deep.

Here, too, is lamb shank, stacked high in a pot and steamed over boiling spices. It may be ordered large, on the bone and angled like a club, or small, shucked and bulging with fat that springs back from the teeth.

Best is leg of lamb first roasted in a pan with garlic, onions and red streaks of chile, then shaved thin — it looks torn to scraps — so that after the briefest tug the meat surrenders. The taste is all cumin, strong and musky, matching game with game. It’s hard to tell where the fragrance ends and flavor begins.

The menu is to the point: meat, above all lamb.

An Rong Xu for The New York Times

Beef and chicken kebabs are respectable enough, made of whole meat, not ground. But they’re a sideshow to the lamb. (Some vegetarian options have been added since my visit.)

Mr. Yakup, 35, is driven: He left home for Beijing at age 18, taught himself English by watching American movies and ran an English-as-a-second-language school in his apartment. He was accepted by a dozen American colleges, but had no money for tuition; a kindly dean at George Mason University arranged for financial aid (“he basically saved my life”), and a year later Mr. Yakup landed a scholarship to Harvard.

After a stint with an investment firm in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China, Mr. Yakup returned to the United States with a plan to share Uighur culture with the world. He started in guerrilla style, selling kebabs on Manhattan street corners at midnight “to test the market,” he said. “The police told us very nicely to leave, and we did.” Now he has investors, including former Harvard classmates, and a team: his parents and older sister, who recently settled in New York. He calls his father “chief kebab engineer.”

All meats are presented in broad, shallow wooden bowls that might elsewhere be destined for salad. Each plate, generously priced under $10, is identical in its accessories — a handful of cucumbers and tomatoes, yogurt and Uighur polo, a dish general to Central Asia. To make polo (akin to pilaf), rice is cooked with carrots, olive oil and bone-in lamb that’s left in the pot until the very end. (In Kashgar, Mr. Yakup said, they would keep the meat to eat, but for people here “it’s not soft enough.”)

The menu also lists naan (flatbread) as part of each plate, but all I received was a panel of dough blanketing the bottom of each bowl, skinny and stiff as a store-bought tortilla. In Beijing, I once watched a Uighur baker pull rounds of naan from the cavernous mouth of a tonur (akin to a tandoor), the bread thick and half-blackened — nothing like this.

The owner, Kudret Yakup, taught himself English by watching American movies, won a scholarship to Harvard and after graduating started an investment firm.

An Rong Xu for The New York Times

It wasn’t naan, as it turned out, but in fact a tortilla, meant to be decorative, like a placemat. Two wedges of naan were supposed to go on top, chewy flatbread from an Uzbek bakery in Queens; someone in the kitchen had simply forgotten to put them on my plates, Mr. Yakup explained apologetically. He hopes to bake his own some day. “There are hundreds of kinds,” he said. “Ones big as the wheels of a car, ones small as fists.”

The dining room is a minimalist black box, with orders placed and picked up at the counter and tables up for grabs. Sometimes the crowd grows quarrelsome. One night, when I was about to abandon my table, two hovering customers came close to blows over it.

Mr. Yakup oversees a Kebab Empire stand in the New World Mall in Flushing, Queens, as well. There, for a brief spell last summer, he offered maruxna (Uighur ice cream), a meld of milk, eggs and brown sugar, hand-churned with a great wooden spoon.

It proved too labor-intensive. In its stead now is doogh, a simple drink of honeyed yogurt, not too sweet, with a crumble of rose petals on top. Mr. Yakup is focused on kebabs — and empire.